Power
A 90-Day Power Outage Plan
A household plan in six pillars, set out in the order a family meets the trouble: water, heat, food, light, sanitation and power.
To get a household through a 90-day power outage, plan for six things in the order they fail: safe water within the first day or two, heat within hours in winter, food once the freezer warms, light every evening, sanitation once the toilets stop flushing, and a small, rationed supply of electricity for the few loads that matter most. Each pillar needs a stored supply for the first two weeks and a way to keep producing it after that, because no garage holds three months of everything.
This page is the plan in outline. Every pillar links to the guide on this site that covers it in full, so you can work down the list one weekend at a time.
Why plan for 90 days at all?
Most outages end in hours. A long one is a different animal, and the federal list of what it does is sobering. Ready.gov warns that an extended outage can cut phone service, water and transportation, close grocery stores, gas stations, ATMs and banks, spoil food, contaminate water and stop medical devices. Two weeks of that is a hard winter. Three months means the stores you were counting on to restock you are dark too.
Ninety days is a planning number. It is long enough to force the question every short-term kit dodges: what happens when the stored supply runs out? A household that can answer that for water, heat and food has a plan. One that only has a pile of jugs and cans has a countdown.
The words "power grid emergency" turn up in the news more often now. They usually refer to an Energy Emergency Alert, which a grid operator declares when demand runs ahead of supply. The ERCOT overview describes three escalating levels, and at the top one the operator cuts power to areas in turns to keep the whole system from failing. An alert like that is short by design. Treat it as a fire drill: fill the water containers, charge every battery and run through this list while the lights are still on.
How a long outage unfolds
It helps to think in three stretches, because each one puts a different pillar under pressure.
- Days 1 to 3: the freezer is still cold, the taps may still run, and the job is to stay warm, keep the doors shut on the fridge and stop wasting water.
- Days 4 to 14: the freezer has thawed, gas stations without generators have stopped pumping, and the household lives on stored water, the pantry and whatever heat it can make safely.
- Weeks 3 to 13: stored supplies run low, and the household shifts to making water safe, cooking long-term staples, burning wood or other stored fuel, and managing waste for the long haul.
Most people stop preparing after the second stretch. A three-month plan is mostly about the third.
Pillar 1: Water, from the first morning
Water fails first in more houses than people expect. A private well stops the moment its pump loses power, and city water can lose pressure or come under a boil notice when treatment plants and pump stations run short of backup fuel. A family can go weeks on short rations of food but only days without safe water.
The planning figure is one gallon per person per day for drinking and basic washing. For a family of four over 90 days that comes to 360 gallons, which is more than most homes can store in jugs. So the water pillar has two layers:
- A stored supply for the first two weeks. Clean jugs and one or two food-grade drums. Our guide to how much water to store per person covers containers and where to put them, and the 55-gallon drum guide covers filling, treating and rotating the big ones.
- A way to treat more after that. Rain from a gutter, a creek, a pond or a neighbor's pool all need treating before anyone drinks them. Filter cloudy water first, then disinfect it. We have separate guides to filtering, to boiling and the fuel it takes per gallon, and to disinfecting with plain bleach.
In winter, stored water freezes, cracks its containers and becomes useless. If any of yours sits in a garage or shed, read keeping stored water from freezing before the first cold snap.
Pillar 2: Heat, before the house gets cold
In a northern winter a house without power can drop to dangerous temperatures inside a couple of days, and the pipes freeze with it. This is also the pillar where most outage deaths come from the fix: a generator in the garage, a charcoal grill in the kitchen, a gas oven left open for warmth. Ready.gov is blunt that a gas stove or oven must never be used to heat the home, and it asks for battery-backed carbon monoxide alarms on every level.
For three months, the answer for most households is a wood stove or a vented heater that needs no electricity, a stored fuel supply sized for a winter, and one warm room where the family lives. How to heat a house without power walks through each heat source, the one-room setup and protecting the pipes. Wood only works if it is dry, and green wood cut in December will not burn properly until the following year. Our guide to seasoning firewood explains why this pillar has to start a season ahead.
Summer outages turn the problem around. Without air conditioning the risk is heat illness, especially for older adults, so the plan there is shade, airflow at night, water and a known cooling location. Ready.gov tells households to go to a community location with power if the heat or cold is extreme.
Pillar 3: Food, once the freezer warms
Ready.gov's figures set the clock: the refrigerator keeps food cold for about four hours with the door shut, and a full freezer holds its temperature for about 48. After that, food that has sat at 40°F or above for two hours goes in the trash. The first job is to eat or preserve the freezer before it is lost, which our guide to what to keep, cook or throw out when the freezer loses power sets out in order.
After the first week, the household lives on what it stored. A quarter-year of food for a family is a real quantity, measured in buckets of rice, wheat and beans more than in cans, and it has to be food the family can cook without an electric range. Start with these:
- How much food to store for a family of four for three months gives the quantities.
- The food and water storage calculator sizes it for your own household and number of days.
- Packing rice, beans and wheat for the long term covers buckets, Mylar and oxygen absorbers.
- Food storage mistakes lists the habits that spoil a stockpile before it is needed.
Cooking is the half people forget. Beans and whole grains take a lot of heat, so the fuel you store for cooking matters as much as the food. A stove that burns wood heats the room and the pot at once, and our guide to cooking on a wood stove covers the learning curve. Camp stoves and grills burn outdoors only. Ready.gov puts them at least 20 feet from windows, the same as a generator.
Past a month, the household that can add food does better than the one that only subtracts it. A spring or summer outage favors a survival garden and laying hens. Meat from a thawed freezer can be saved with pressure canning on a propane burner, or by the methods in preserving meat without refrigeration.
Medicine that needs a refrigerator
This belongs inside the food pillar because it competes for the same cold. Ready.gov asks households to talk to their doctor about a plan for refrigerated medicines and power-dependent devices before an outage, and to find out how long each drug keeps at higher temperatures.
Insulin is the case most families face. The FDA's emergency guidance says insulin in the maker's vials or cartridges, opened or not, can stay unrefrigerated between 59°F and 86°F for up to 28 days and keep working. It also says insulin that has been frozen must not be used, so a cooler of ice needs a barrier between the ice and the vials. For anything on a three-month horizon, ask the pharmacist which prescriptions can be filled ahead and how each one should be kept.
A household with a CPAP, an oxygen concentrator or a powered wheelchair should write that load into the power pillar below before anything else.
Pillar 4: Light, every evening
Light looks like a small problem until the first long winter evening, when the sun is down before five and the house is black by half past. Ready.gov asks for a flashlight for every person. Batteries alone will not carry 90 days, though, so the light pillar needs a way to recharge or a fuel that stores.
- A headlamp for each adult and a battery lantern in each bedroom, for the hours when everyone is asleep or moving around in the dark.
- Rechargeable cells and a small solar panel or a power station to top them up during the day.
- One kerosene or oil lamp for the room where adults sit in the evening, with the fuel stored outside.
A flame indoors brings fire and fumes into the house, and our guide to kerosene and oil lamps in an outage covers fuel, clearance, refilling and carbon monoxide. Candles are the weakest choice for a long outage, and fire services ask families to keep them out of bedrooms entirely.
Pillar 5: Sanitation, when the toilets stop
On city sewer, a toilet still flushes as long as the water keeps coming or you pour a bucket into the bowl. A septic system with an electric lift pump, or a house on a well, loses that within days. Flushing with stored drinking water would drain the water pillar in weeks, so sanitation needs its own supplies.
Loma Linda University's emergency sanitation guide sets out the method, and it is simple:
- Bail the water out of the bowl, line it with a heavy plastic bag and use it as a commode. Where no toilet is usable, a 5-gallon bucket with a snap-on seat does the same job.
- Disinfect solid waste with a little bleach diluted one part to ten parts water, or with powdered chlorinated lime.
- Seal each bag, carry it outside and keep it in a closed bin away from people until the city collects it.
- Better still, run two buckets, one for urine and one for feces. The guide calls it a twin-bucket system. Keeping them apart cuts the volume and the smell, and a scoop of sawdust or wood chips over each use keeps the solids manageable.
Handwashing matters as much as the toilet, since a sick household in a long outage has no urgent care to turn to. Set up a jug with a spigot, soap and a basin by the door. The same guide says hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol works when water is short, but not on hands that are visibly dirty. Stock bags, bleach, toilet paper and wipes in the same quantity you stock food. A family goes through a surprising number of heavy bags in 90 days, so buy them by the case.
Pillar 6: Power, rationed to what matters
Power comes last on purpose. A generator feels like the answer to a long outage, but fuel is the catch. Gasoline goes stale, stations need grid power to pump, and few homes can store enough to run one all day until spring. A generator in a 90-day plan runs a few hours a day for the loads that protect the other pillars: the well pump to refill water, the freezer to hold the meat you have not canned yet, the medical device, and the batteries for the lights.
Two guides cover the rest. Sizing a generator for the things a house must run helps you list those loads and match a machine to them. Generator safety covers placement outdoors, carbon monoxide and the backfeeding danger to line workers. Ready.gov also advises unplugging appliances during the outage, because power often comes back with surges that can damage them.
Solar panels with batteries make sense where a household can afford them, because the sun is a fuel nobody has to store. A small panel feeding a portable power station can keep phones, a radio and the lights charged, and every hour it covers is an hour the generator stays off.
Money and news when the grid is down
Two smaller items cut across every pillar. ATMs and card readers stop with the grid, so keep some cash in small bills at home. And when cell towers run down their backup batteries, a battery or hand-crank radio becomes the only way to hear what officials are saying about water notices, shelters and repairs. Ready.gov also suggests finding out whether your home phone works in an outage and how long its battery backup lasts.
A grid-down household plan, step by step
If you are starting from nothing, work in this order. Each step makes the next one safer.
- Store two weeks of water, and put battery-powered carbon monoxide and smoke alarms on every floor.
- Set up a heat source that needs no electricity and lay in dry fuel for a winter.
- Build two weeks of pantry food you can cook without the grid, then deepen it to three months with stored staples.
- Buy a headlamp for each person, rechargeable batteries and a way to charge them.
- Put together the sanitation kit: buckets, seats, bags, bleach, toilet paper and soap.
- Add a way to treat water from outside the house, so the stored supply is a buffer rather than the whole plan.
- Only then size a generator or solar setup for the few loads that remain.
Write the plan down and keep it with the supplies: where the main water valve is, which room you will heat, which foods to eat first and who is in charge of the generator. In the dark, on day 30, a sheet of paper is easier to follow than a memory.
My take: where I'd put the first dollar
I'd start with water and heat, and I'd hold off on anything that runs on a motor until both are settled. A household with clean water, a stove and a dry woodpile can ride out a winter on rice and beans, while one with a big generator and no fuel is back at square one by the second week. Next I'd build the pantry slowly, a bucket at a time, and buy the sanitation kit on the same trip. It is the cheapest pillar and the one nobody wants to think about until the toilet stops.
What I'd skip: a whole-house generator bought before the water and heat are sorted, and candles as the main light. I'd judge any plan by one question: on day 30, with the shelves and drums half empty, does each pillar still have a way to make more?
The guides in the power section and across the site go deeper on each step. Start with the pillar your house is weakest in.
